AI Agent Governance

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Overview

AI agent governance asks who may delegate authority to agents, which actions they can take, and how people can detect, contest, or remedy harmful behavior. Technical approaches include runtime policy enforcement, capability-based access, contracts and formal verification, human approval gates, and auditable records of actions, identity, and delegation. Other work examines governance of persistent memory and agent collectives, alongside legal responsibility, institutional design, and standards for interoperable systems. The field is developing practical architectures and benchmarks, but a central tension remains: stronger controls can reduce risk while limiting autonomy and usefulness, and bounded tests do not yet establish reliable governance in open-ended deployments.

Latest papers

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446 papers37 papers in the last four weeks, down 36% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Accountable Agents in Software Engineering: An Analysis of Terms of Service and a Research Roadmap

    May 6, 2026Christoph TreudeSoftware EngineeringAI Accountability

    Singapore Management University Singapore, Singapore

  2. Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligence

    May 5, 2026Munkhdelgerekh Batzorig, Purevbaatar Ganbold, Kyungbin Park +2Multi-Agent SystemsAI Agent Governance

    Department of Information Security Engineering, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, South Korea · Department of Mobility Convergence Security, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, South Korea

  3. TRACE: A Metrologically-Grounded Engineering Framework for Trustworthy Agentic AI Systems in Operationally Critical Domains

    May 5, 2026Serhii ZabolotniiAI Agent SafetyAI Agent Governance

    Cherkasy State Business College, Cherkasy 18028, Ukraine · State Scientific Research Institute of Armament and Military Equipment Testing and Certification, Cherkasy, Ukraine · healthPrecision, New York, NY, USA

  4. Governed Metaprogramming for Intelligent Systems: Reclassifying Eval as a Governed Effect

    May 5, 2026Alan L. McCannCapability-Based SecurityAI Agent Governance

    Mashin, Inc.

  5. An Empirical Study of Agent Skills for Healthcare: Practice, Gaps, and Governance

    May 4, 2026Gelei Xu, Ningzhi Tang, Xueyang Li +4HealthcareAI Agent Safety

    University of Notre Dame · Emory University

  6. ANNEAL: Adapting LLM Agents via Governed Symbolic Patch Learning

    May 4, 2026Safayat Bin Hakim, Keyan Guo, Wenkai Tan +3LLM Agent Self-ImprovementAI Agent Governance

    University of Maryland, Baltimore County · University at Buffalo · University of Colorado Boulder +1

  7. Who Decides What Is Harmful? Content Moderation Policy Through A Multi-Agent Personalised Inference Framework

    May 2, 2026Ewelina Gajewska, Michal Wawer, Katarzyna Budzynska +1LLM GuardrailsContent Moderation

    Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

  8. Governing What the EU AI Act Excludes: Accountability for Autonomous AI Agents in Smart City Critical Infrastructure

    May 1, 2026Talal Ashraf Butt, Muhammad Iqbal, Razi IqbalAI AccountabilityMulti-Agent Systems

    aHigher Colleges of Technology, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates · bCentral Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, United States of America

  9. Certified Purity for Cognitive Workflow Executors: From Static Analysis to Cryptographic Attestation

    May 1, 2026Alan L. McCannRemote AttestationFormal Verification

    Mashin, Inc.

  10. Effect-Transparent Governance for AI Workflow Architectures: Semantic Preservation, Expressive Minimality, and Decidability Boundaries

    May 1, 2026Alan L. McCannAgentic WorkflowsFormal Verification

    Mashin, Inc.

  11. Comprehensive AI governance requires addressing non-model gains

    May 1, 2026Arthur Goemans, Dan Altman, Noemi Dreksler +8AI Risk ManagementAI Agent Governance

    1Google DeepMind · Centre for the Governance of AI

  12. AgentReputation: A Decentralized Agentic AI Reputation Framework

    Apr 30, 2026Mohd Sameen Chishti, Damilare Peter Oyinloye, Jingyue LiAI AccountabilityAI Agent Security

    Department of Computer Science NTNU Trondheim, Norway

  13. Compliance-Aware Agentic Payments on Stablecoin Rails

    Apr 30, 2026Kenneth See, Xue Wen TanFinancial ServicesAI Agent Governance

    1Monetary Authority of Singapore · 2Infocomm Media Development Authority

  14. When Agents Evolve, Institutions Follow

    Apr 30, 2026Chao Fei, Hongcheng Guo, Yanghua XiaoMulti-Agent OrchestrationMulti-Agent Systems

    KAUST · Fudan University

  15. End-to-End Evaluation and Governance of an EHR-Embedded AI Agent for Clinicians

    Apr 30, 2026Aaryan Shah, Andrew Hines, Alexia Downs +6HealthcareAI Agent Evaluation

    1Canvas Medical, San Francisco, CA, USA · Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · 3XPC (X Primary Care) +2

  16. The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally

    Apr 30, 2026Alan L. McCannCapability-Based SecurityAI Agent Governance

    Mashin, Inc.

  17. Mechanized Foundations of Structural Governance: Machine-Checked Proofs for Governed Intelligence

    Apr 30, 2026Alan L. McCannProperty-Based TestingFormal Verification

    Mashin, Inc.

  18. Ambient Persuasion in a Deployed AI Agent: Unauthorized Escalation Following Routine Non-Adversarial Content Exposure

    Apr 29, 2026Diego F. Cuadros, Abdoul-Aziz MaigaAgent Failure AnalysisAI Agent Security

    Digital Epidemiology Laboratory, Digital Futures, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA · Center for Humanities and Technology (CHaT), University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA · Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

  19. TRUST: A Framework for Decentralized AI Service v.0.1

    Apr 29, 2026Yu-Chao Huang, Zhen Tan, Mohan Zhang +3AI Agent ReliabilityAI Accountability

    UNITES Lab, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Arizona State University · Columbia University

  20. TDD Governance for Multi-Agent Code Generation via Prompt Engineering

    Apr 29, 2026Tarlan Hasanli, Shahbaz Siddeeq, Bishwash Khanal +3LLM PromptingAI Agent Governance

    Tampere University Tampere, Finland

  21. Agent Name Service (ANS): A Proof-of-Concept Trust Layer for Secure AI Agent Discovery, Identity, and Governance in Kubernetes

    Apr 29, 2026Akshay Mittal, Elyson De La CruzAI Agent SecurityAI Agent Governance

    Department of Information Technology University of the Cumberlands Williamsburg, KY, USA

  22. Think Before You Act -- A Neurocognitive Governance Model for Autonomous AI Agents

    Apr 28, 2026Eranga Bandara, Ross Gore, Asanga Gunaratna +12Cognitive Architectures for AI AgentsAI Agent Governance

    Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA · AI Motion Labs, Melbourne, Australia · Florida International University, FL, USA +6

  23. Toward a Science of Intent: Closure Gaps and Delegation Envelopes for Open-World AI Agents

    Apr 27, 2026Maximiliano Armesto, Christophe KolbAI Agent EvaluationAI Agent Safety

    Taller Technologies

  24. Governing What You Cannot Observe: Adaptive Runtime Governance for Autonomous AI Agents

    Apr 27, 2026German Marin, Jatin ChaudharyAI Agent SafetyAI Agent Monitoring

    Department of Computing, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

  25. FastOMOP: A Foundational Architecture for Reliable Agentic Real-World Evidence Generation on OMOP CDM data

    Apr 27, 2026Niko Moeller-Grell, Shihao Shenzhang, Zhangshu Joshua Jiang +2Multi-Agent OrchestrationHealthcare

    EPSRC DRIVE-Health, Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics, King’s College London, UK. · Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK. · Institute for Health Informatics, University College London, UK. +5

  26. EndoGov: A knowledge-governed multi-agent expert system for endometrial cancer risk stratification

    Apr 26, 2026Weiye Dai, Liyun Shi, Zanxiang He +4Clinical Decision SupportMulti-Agent Systems

    aShenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, China · bShenzhen People’s Hospital, Shenzhen, China · dShenzhen University, Shenzhen, China +1

  27. Proof of Execution: Runtime Verification for Governed AI Agent Actions

    Apr 26, 2026James Rhodes, George KangAI Agent SecurityFormal Verification

    AlphaBitCore, Inc.

  28. Structural Enforcement of Goal Integrity in AI Agents via Separation-of-Powers Architecture

    Apr 26, 2026Rong XiangAI Agent SecurityAI Agent Safety

  29. AI Identity: Standards, Gaps, and Research Directions for AI Agents

    Apr 25, 2026Takumi Otsuka, Kentaroh Toyoda, Alex LeungAI AccountabilityAI Agent Security

    1AIFT, Singapore · 2Graduate School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Communications Engineering, Waseda University, Japan · 3Keio Global Research Institute (KGRI), Japan

  30. A Decoupled Human-in-the-Loop System for Controlled Autonomy in Agentic Workflows

    Apr 24, 2026Edward Cheng, Jeshua ChengAgentic WorkflowsHuman-in-the-Loop AI